From Myth to Philosophy: Hesiod and Thales

I mentioned in the previous lecture that the first philosopher in the West is generally considered to be the pre-Socratic thinker Thales. His date is typically given as 585 BC. Of course, that's approximate. As I also mentioned in the first lecture, our source material for the pre-Socratics is very fragmentary. Historians, however, have agreed on this date, 585, and that's where we will begin. Actually, however, I'm going to first take a step backwards. I found in my experience teaching that in order to explain anything, it's often useful in order to explain what something is to try to explain what it is not. And that's what I would like to do in the first part of this lecture. I want to take a step backwards to the time before philosophy, before 585 BC. And before philosophy, the Greeks, of course, were not silent. They were not unintelligent. They were extremely active. The time was pre-philosophical, but it certainly was productive. Before philosophy, there was myth. To use the Greek word, there was muthos, a word which can be translated as myth. That's its exact cognate, but which can also be translated simply as story. Before philosophy, there was storytelling. There was poetry. We'll take a short step backwards and a quick look at one of the great pre-pre-Socratic storytellers, the poet Hesiod, as a way of preparing ourselves to make the transition to Thales and the beginning of philosophy. The greatest of all poets in ancient Greece was, of course, Homer. Homer wrote in approximately 700. He wrote about the Trojan War, which in fact was some sort of historical event. It probably occurred 400 years before Homer wrote, around 1100 BC. He was very much the culmination of a tradition of oral poetry about the Trojan War and about the return of the Greek fighters from Troy back to Greece. You've heard, I hope, of the poems, the Iliad, which is the story of Achilles, and the Trojan War, and the Odyssey, which is the story of Odysseus returning from Troy to Greece. The poet I want to concentrate on, however, is Hesiod, who also wrote somewhere around 700 BC. What I think is so interesting about Hesiod is his poem, The Theogony, which is a creation story. It's a myth of creation. It is, therefore, naturally akin to philosophy. At the same time, however, and as I hope to explain, it is fundamentally different from philosophy. The Theogony tells the story of the coming into being of the Greek gods. The Greeks were polytheists. They had many gods. The Theogony tells the story not only of the Greek gods and their coming into being, but the coming into being of the natural world, of the mountains, and the rivers, and the forests, the coming into being of the human world. What I would like to do is focus your attention only on the very, very beginning of Hesiod's Theogony and use that, once again, as a way of preparing for our transition to Thales and the beginning of philosophy. The first thing to notice about Hesiod's poem, and this would also be true of Homer's poem, is that it begins with an invocation to the Muses. The Muses were the daughters of Zeus, who was the king of the gods, and memory. They were the goddesses of inspiration. Hesiod tells a little story about himself. He was a poor shepherd, shepherding his sheep. When the Muses breathed into him, inspired him with a voice to sing of the very beginning of the world itself. Everything that Hesiod has to say, therefore, is directly linked to the Muses. In that sense, Hesiod himself, as he is the first to admit, is not responsible for his own poem. His poem has an external source. That source is the Muses, the gods of inspiration. Let me read the very beginning of the most important section in Hesiod's Theogony. He says the following, Tell me these things, Olympian Muses, from the beginning, and tell which of them came first. In the beginning there was only chaos, the abyss, but then Gaia, the earth, came into being, her broad bosom, the ever-firm foundation of all, and Tartarus, dim in the underground depths, and Eros, loveliest of all the immortals. Let's notice a couple of things about that passage. First, and I've already mentioned it, it begins with an invocation to the Muses. Once again, Hesiod himself does not take responsibility for what he is going to say. His source is outside of him. It's in this power of inspiration. Second, let's look at some of the details of this very beginning story. In the beginning there was only chaos. That's a Greek word, and of course we have that exact word now in English. However, what the word means today in English is quite different from what it means in Greek. In English, chaos means a disordered set of parts. There are many, many things and they're chaotic. If I took this room here and jumbled up all the books and the tables and the pictures, you'd look at the room and say, it's chaotic. That's not what the word means in Greek. It means, and your translator is trying to help you with this, it also means the abyss. It means the gap in between two other things. It means finally, and I think most interestingly, something like nothingness. In the beginning there was chaos. In the beginning there was nothing. From that chaos came earth, says Hesiod. But notice, he hasn't explained why. He hasn't explained how. For no reason whatsoever, earth just pops into being. Along with earth comes Tartarus, the underworld, and in addition to Tartarus comes Eros. Eros, literally translated, means sexual desire. At the very beginning of things was Eros. The reason for that, and if you read further in the Theogony you'll see this, is that what Hesiod is really telling is a genealogy, a family tree of the Greek gods, indeed of the whole world. In other words, for Hesiod, the world comes into being by sexual reproduction. And therefore Eros, which is the principle of sexual reproduction, is the energy of sexual reproduction, is there right in the beginning. So, to summarize, in the beginning there was nothing and then there was something. There was earth, there was Tartarus, and there was Eros. What I would like to suggest to you is that this story in a very deep and actually very beautiful way makes little sense. It makes little sense because the very notion of something coming from nothing makes little sense. How could something come from nothing? Why would something come from nothing? This is precisely where Hesiod is silent. For reasons that he is either unwilling or unable to tell us, there was earth. Perhaps think about it in one additional way. The very notion of chaos, and here I am referring to its Greek sense, namely as nothingness or the abyss, the very notion of chaos is itself unintelligible. We can't really think nothing. Surprisingly, this is going to be a theme in some of the philosophers we're going to encounter in the next few lectures. The very notion of nothingness. From the philosopher's perspective, we'll see that nothingness is impossible to think of. You might say it this way. Nothingness is an illegal concept. It makes no sense. How can you think of nothing? In fact, you might want to experiment with this at home. Actually try to think of nothing, and I suspect you'll find it can't be done. Nonetheless, this is where Hesiod locates the very origin of all of reality, is in nothingness. I think now we have two ways of thinking about what I'm calling the irrationality of Hesiod's poem. These two ways are very beautifully related to one another. The first, as I've just mentioned, is in the story itself, namely the beginning in nothingness or chaos. I've suggested to you that is unintelligible. That really doesn't make sense to think of something coming from nothing. The second is in the very invocation of the muse. When Hesiod invokes the muse, it's as if he's admitting from the outset that what he's about to say he can't really explain. What I'm suggesting to you is that if you examine both the content of his story and the way he tells the story, the form of the story and the content of the story, they actually fit together very nicely. The form of the story is a muthos, a myth, and for the Greeks that meant an invocation to the muse. The content of the story is in the beginning there was chaos, and then for no reasons whatsoever there was earth. So both the form and the content seem to be expressing the same message. The message is that human beings seem to be incapable on their own of figuring out the nature of reality. That's why Hesiod tells a myth. Please don't misunderstand. I'm calling this muthos irrational, but in no way am I offering that as a criticism. There is a tremendous sense of intelligence and coherence in Hesiod's Theogony. It fits together very beautifully, especially if you approach it in the way that I'm suggesting, namely as a poem which expresses the fact that maybe human beings just can't figure out the world we live in. With that in mind, I think we're now prepared to actually begin the history of Western philosophy with Thales. Once again we give his date as 585, and please again remember that's approximate. He comes from Miletus. Miletus is a town on the west coast of Turkey, of what is Turkey today. This was a part of the world that had been colonized by the Greeks in previous centuries. It was a Greek-speaking region, even though it's not in what we now call Greece proper. According to Aristotle and most subsequent historians of philosophy, Thales was the first natural philosopher. He was the first thinker in the West to give what the Greeks called a logos of nature. The word nature in Greek is physis. So we might now say that Thales was the first physiologist. If you think of the word physiologist, what it simply means is one who gives a logos of nature. And what is a logos? A logos is a rational explanation. The word logos, as in the word physiology, is present in many, many suffixes in many English words. A word like biology literally means a logos of life. The word psychology means a logos of the soul or the mind. Thales is called the first philosopher precisely because he is the first, again this is according to Aristotle, he is the first to give a logos of nature. What sort of logos? What does this mean? Let me turn to the text itself and give you a little taste of it. I'm now quoting from Aristotle who says the following, Of those who first pursued philosophy, the majority believe that the only principles of all things are principles in the form of matter. For that out of which all existing things are composed, and that out of which they originally come into being, and that into which they finally perish, the substance persisting but changing in all its attributes, this, they state, is the principle of things that are. However, not all agree about the number and form of such a principle. But Thales, the founder of this kind of philosophy, declares it to be water. Now that's a mouthful. Let me try to unpack it a little bit. The first and the most important word to notice in this passage is the word that's translated in English as principle. Thales believed, along with other early Greek philosophers, that the principle of all things is material, is in the form of matter. What does the word principle mean? The Greek word here is wonderful and extremely important. The word is arche, arche. This word can be translated as principle, as origin, as beginning, as source. It also can mean ruler. So perhaps what it means is the beginning which then rules over everything that follows. We have remnants of this word in our words archaic, archeology, referring to very old things. The arche then is the beginning, not just in the sense of time, but the beginning in the sense of the fundamental origin of everything else. According to Aristotle, all of the early pre-Socratics believed that there was an arche and that the arche was in the form of matter. Specifically with Thales, he believed that the arche was in the form of water. So now we can boil down Thales' position into one sentence. The arche is water. Let me go a little bit further in Aristotle to give you more of a feel for what sort of thinker Thales was. Aristotle speculates as to how Thales could have come up with this idea that the origin of all things is water. Aristotle says the following, Maybe Thales got this idea from seeing that the nourishment of all things is moist and that the hot itself comes to be from the moist and that water is the principle of the nature of moist things. In other words, what I think Aristotle is suggesting here is that Thales is what today we would call an empirical thinker. An empirical thinker is one who uses sense experience in order to get information or knowledge about the world. An empirical thinker uses his eyes, his ears, in order to understand the world. According to Aristotle, Thales made some primitive observations. He observed that all living things required water. He lived in a very dry place and I think in that environment the essential qualities of water were appreciated very deeply from the perspective of the shoreline of Miletus as Thales looked out into the sea. It would certainly have looked to Thales as if the earth itself was sitting on water. From all of these observations, Aristotle suggests, Thales derived a conclusion and the conclusion was that the arche, the principle, the origin was water. Let's pause now and try to compare this with Hesiod. For Hesiod, and he doesn't use the word but I think he thinks the thought, for Hesiod the arche is chaos, is nothingness. The origin of all things is found in what is unintelligible, namely nothingness. That's why when earth comes to be from chaos there's no explanation because the arche itself is unintelligible. For Thales, by contrast, the arche is fully intelligible. It's water, an ordinary substance, a substance that is fully intelligible. It's something we can all recognize. We can observe it. Thales could have cut open a seed, cut open a plant. He could have cut open an animal, seen the water inside of these living things. Now I think we can understand why Thales required no muse, and this is an essential characteristic of philosophical thinking. Thales needed no muse because Thales believed that on his own, using only his reasoning capacity, using his senses, using his mind, he was able to plumb the depths of reality itself, and then he was able to explain it. Now it's very easy, of course, to dismiss Thales' position as primitive, as childish even. We all know, we're so very sophisticated, that water is not the origin of all of reality. Water is not the arche. That's perfectly obvious to us. But I would argue that the year 585 and Thales' position, which was articulated then, is utterly revolutionary, and its impact can't be overestimated. Thales was the first thinker in the West to boldly declare that reality itself could be conceived. Let me offer a set of terms that will be very important in this course, and indeed are very important throughout the history of philosophy. I'm going to put the same point I've just made in slightly different terms. And I'll return to Aristotle, whose language, as you heard the first time, is not very easy to figure out. Aristotle said this about Thales. For that of which all existing things are composed, and that out of which they originally come into being, and that into which they finally perish, that is the substance that endures, that is the arche for Thales, that is water. Now I think the most helpful terms that I can come up with here to offer you would be two. The words being and becoming. Let me talk about becoming first. These are basic philosophical terms. The word becoming refers to this process of coming into being and going out of being, coming into being and perishing. Becoming is a category. It labels a chunk of reality, that chunk of reality which goes through the process I just described. By contrast, the word being refers to that which endures. Something which is in the world or the realm, the category of becoming, comes into being and goes out of being. But being itself remains, and it remains the same. Equipped with these two words, we can once again reformulate Thales' position. For Thales, the being, or the arche, is water. Water endures. Water goes through many transformations. Through the process of condensation, or the process of evaporation, water might go through various transformations, but water itself always endures. When a living being is born, it is born from water, and when that living being dies, it returns to water. The process is very cyclical. You might think of being as in the middle and becoming circling around it, going out of being, going into being. This is true not just of living things, according to Thales, but of all things. Being is the ultimate reality. We can once again transpose this back to Hesiod. I think for Hesiod, the poet, the myth-maker, the storyteller, being is unintelligible. We have no way of thinking it, no way of conceptualizing it. Being is chaos. The arche is chaos. Again, I'm using words Hesiod himself doesn't use, but I'm doing so in order to really underline the enormous contribution Thales is making in the year 585. I mentioned to you in the first lecture that when we study Greek philosophy, we're not simply studying the past. It's extremely important to have a sense of the historical influence of the Greeks on subsequent developments in Western thought. However, when we study Greek philosophy, we can also do so with an eye not simply to historical influence, but to the living quality of these ideas. I would suggest to you that right at the beginning, in the confrontation, I was tempted to say debate, but I don't think that captures the difference between Thales and Hesiod. Right at the beginning, with this confrontation, this emergence of philosophy from poetry, in distinction to poetry, what we really have are two fundamental ways of looking at what it means to be a human being. Can a human being use their intellect, their mind, to understand something about their experience, their world, or is the world somehow separated from us, distant from us? Will it always remain distant? Hesiod would clearly answer yes. The world must always be distant, and this is why I, Hesiod, the poet, the maker of myths, I need a muse. Thales, by contrast, has enormous confidence, and he boldly declares, not only can I understand this or that about the world, but I can understand the underlying structure of the world itself, the archaic. This debate, this confrontation, is with us today. I think it perhaps is in all of us. It's the battle that Plato, 200 years later, will describe as the old battle between philosophy and poetry. The poet expresses the view that Hesiod himself is expressing, namely this view that at its core, perhaps human life is unintelligible, and therefore we tell stories, and therefore we hope for inspiration, and therefore we cannot claim responsibility for articulating the world on our own. The philosopher, by contrast, and Thales here is the first philosopher, is able to confront the world and see it at its core, or so he believes. I offer you one last set of terms to think about Thales and the difference between philosophy and poetry. These two terms are the one and the many. Thales is a great believer that underneath the enormous variety, the multiplicity, the diversity of the world, there is unity. The unity is found in the archaic, in the principle of water itself. The many can be unified by the one, and the one, in his case, is water, a completely intelligible, ordinary substance. One last time, a contrast with Hesiod. For Hesiod, there is no one underneath the many. Instead, there's only chaos and the abyss. Once again, we know, of course, that Thales was wrong in any objective or scientific sense. But he sets in motion a train of thought that will continue until this very day. And what we'll see next, in the very next lecture, is the first consequence of Thales' beginning. He will not be allowed to go uncriticized. He will be criticized by the next generation of thinkers. But this basic framework that he invents, where he discovers the framework of the archaic as being and everything else as becoming, the framework which insists a one underlies the many, is one which will be retained by the subsequent thinkers in Greek philosophy and indeed in all of Western philosophy.